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I am attempting to make a system image of a Windows 10 laptop. I had a 16 GB inserted to use but the machine rejected that as an option so I am using DVD+RW 4.7 GB size.

This is a brand new laptop with most of the crapware uninstalled so I wanted a copy of it that way in case of disaster. It is a Toshiba Satellite.

I am using System Image Backup found on the File History page.

So far however it has taken 5 DVDs and 5 hours of copying. By the looks of the progress bar it will take at least 4 more DVDs. Am I missing something here? This seems excessive on all fronts to me.

Please help and explain to me what I need to do to make some kind of backup of this clean system to restore to in case I ever need to. I do have an initial "System Recovery" on a 16 GB thumb drive of the factory install. And I have a "Boot Disk" on a DVD.

Just now noticed that the Backup and Restore page is also labeled with "(Windows7)". What does that mean?

Thanks all. I am feeling really dumb right now and anxious about having a good copy of this OS to restore from.

I am attempting to make a system image of a Windows 10 laptop. I had a 16 GB inserted to use but the machine rejected that as an option so I am using DVD+RW 4.7 GB size.

Which is insanely too small, as is a 16GB flash drive. But you've already figured that out.

I am using System Image Backup found on the File History page.

I'm not seeing that on File History, but you can get to that option via the "Backup & Restore (Windows 7)" panel.

So far however it has taken 5 DVDs and 5 hours of copying. By the looks of the progress bar it will take at least 4 more DVDs. Am I missing something here? This seems excessive on all fronts to me.

But it's not excessive. A system image is just that - an image of your *entire* system including user data, etc. I feel rather certain that if you look at "This PC" that your C:\ drive will have well over 100 GB on it. If it only had that much on it that will take you over 20 DVDs to create a system image on. You really need to invest in a backup drive of at least 500GB to have for not only a system image but to use File History for your data files and/or other backup software (many drives come with backup software included if you don't want to use File History). A 500GB drive is about $50 or so and a 1TB drive is between $80 and $100.

Please help and explain to me what I need to do to make some kind of backup of this clean system to restore to in case I ever need to. I do have an initial "System Recovery" on a 16 GB thumb drive of the factory install. And I have a "Boot Disk" on a DVD.

Noted above. A System Recovery disc (or USB thumb drive) is nothing more than the Windows utilities necessary to try to fix an unbootable computer or to recover using a system image you've created when you can't use the repair facilities to revive the machine. The "boot disc" is probably your Windows 10 install media, but I can't be absolutely certain of that. There are many different things that can take the form of a bootable disc. Your System Recovery disc/thumb drive is itself bootable.

Just now noticed that the Backup and Restore page is also labeled with "(Windows7)". What does that mean?

The Backup and Restore utility was carried over directly from Windows 7 and can be used to work with images from Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10. There's no other significance to it, really.

Thanks all. I am feeling really dumb right now and anxious about having a good copy of this OS to restore from.

Go to your local Wal-Mart, Staples, Best Buy or whoever has the best deal on backup drives. For myself, I far prefer the USB 3.0 models designed for laptops (whether I'm backing up a laptop or not) that are about the size of a pack of cigarettes or smaller. I've found these far more durable, and handy, than the full sized desktop drives. I have a 2TB Toshiba Canvio that I have four or five machines backed up on and *lots* of other copies of user data that I want to have backups for. I also use it as the File History drive for my Windows 10 laptop and my partner's Windows 8.1 laptop.

Relax. So long as you get yourself a reasonable backup drive in the near future it's highly unlikely that you're going to have a catastrophic failure at any moment. Just pick one up in the next day or two or wait until the "day after Christmas" sales.

It just finished the backup to the sixth DVD. I can only hope that it was a successful, albeit a painful venture that took over 6 hours to do. Don't know why I thought a 16 GB thumb drive was big enough. Maybe I read that statement about inserting media at least 1 GB in size and assumed from that? Or read something elsewhere that indicated a certain size for something. And I find the terms too many and confusing when looking up how to "backup". So I was confused and common sense should have told me to eyeball the size of the C drive to know what to have for it.

Not sure if I have everything I need now or need to do anything else to button this up before using the computer for real. I installed AVG, Firefox, RevoUninstaller, Auslogics DiskDefrag, Acrobat Reader DC, WinZip and SpyBot AntiBeacon. I have Office to install yet. What else do I need?

"...Don't know why I thought a 16 GB thumb drive was big enough..." This is a very sane idea! You were thinking Rescue [Startup Repair] Stick. I have a couple of 8GB sticks that will boot me into a Windows quick-menu, one of the few options: Startup Repair.

I use Macrium Reflect Free all the time. My Windows 10 Pro and Office Professional 2013 install, plus a few small programs (players, burners, antivirus etc.), takes up 28.3 Gigabytes of my laptop's hard disk. Using Macrium default settings, the image is compressed to 12.6 Gigabytes.

I also use the commercial Acronis True Image, which compresses the same install to 14.3 GB.

Flashdrives / expansion disks, etc for storage, now have large capacities and are no longer prohibitively expensive.

It just finished the backup to the sixth DVD. I can only hope that it was a successful, albeit a painful venture that took over 6 hours to do. Don't know why I thought a 16 GB thumb drive was big enough. Maybe I read that statement about inserting media at least 1 GB in size and assumed from that? Or read something elsewhere that indicated a certain size for something. And I find the terms too many and confusing when looking up how to "backup". So I was confused and common sense should have told me to eyeball the size of the C drive to know what to have for it.

Not sure if I have everything I need now or need to do anything else to button this up before using the computer for real. I installed AVG, Firefox, RevoUninstaller, Auslogics DiskDefrag, Acrobat Reader DC, WinZip and SpyBot AntiBeacon. I have Office to install yet. What else do I need?

Thanks a bunch!

I believe 16GB is the minimum for a flash drive when creating a Recovery Drive that includes the OEM recovery partition.

Since I recently reinstalled win 10 the dl was greater than 3gb in size just for the OS ISO which is why a 4GB memory stick is recommended for that. If you have programs, apps and data included you will want something that will hold it all plus a little for margin of error if nothing else.

There are issues here, at least in my opinion, with people "talking past" each other and equating things that aren't equivalent.

A Windows system image is just that - a full system image including every last thing on your computer. All user data is a part of a system image when you use the Windows utility. They warn you that if you restore from a system image you have no control over what is restored - you will have a system that is in the exact state it was in, data files included, when you took the system image.

A system recovery disc/thumb drive is nothing more than the Windows Utilities (and, optionally, a copy of the system recovery partition) that allow you to attempt to fix Windows errors or to restore from a system image. It's much smaller in size than any system image.

A Windows installation disc, burned from an ISO or otherwise, includes the "bare bones" of the Windows installation in question. I know that for Windows 8 and Windows 10 the install process presumes you will have a connection to the internet so that it can download substantial portions of the OS that aren't a part of the "bare bones." The system install disc is much smaller than the amount of space taken on hard disc by the fully installed OS. [I believe this applied to Windows 7 as well, but it's been too long since I've done a Win7 install to remember clearly.]

Many third-party recovery utilities include only the OS as part of a system image. If only the OS is included, and not user data, the version of a system image they create will be much smaller than the one the Windows utility creates. Mind you, I know that these utilities can and do also back up user data, but those are often not part of a system image, but are a separate backup file of their own. You'd have to (roughly) add up the size of the system image and user data backups combined to get a sense of how similar the space requirements are when compared to the WIndows system image. I personally prefer the "two part" backup, but am often lazy and use the Windows system image utility because I keep separate user data backups using File History and/or third-party software and can always get back a very recent copy of my user data even if I restore from a relatively "ancient" Windows system image.

File History is the Windows built-in user file backup that allows you to recover a given user data file from a specific date and time in the past. I don't know how many iterations back it holds, and some of that is probably determined by how many things you're changing and how much space it needs to keep fresher iterations of high change-level files. It is nice, though, to know that you can go back to say, a Word document with the content it had 3 weeks ago, as opposed to 2 weeks ago, if that's what one wants.

For your patience and wisdom regarding the issue of safeguarding the installation on this new Windows 10 laptop. I do have an installation disk with the free Windows 10 OS on it that I downloaded as an iso. I found my product key on the new computer for it too. So I have more options. Probably some overkill here but I like the comfort of having my old Windows 7 installation disks and do not like the "new" way of doing things.

So I should be good if I do timely regular backups of my files using the built in software, right? Will it do incremental backups or do I have to backup everything each time?

Sounds like File History being on might be a good thing. I did not look but maybe there is settings for how much memory it is allowed to use?

And this is exactly what I must have read before: "I believe 16GB is the minimum for a flash drive when creating a Recovery Drive that includes the OEM recovery partition." I did create one of those too.

Hope I make sense right now. I am a little tired as I type this.

We can probably consider this topic closed unless there is more pertinent advice to be given.